Why do local governments create and reform public service companies, given their uncertain economic benefits and potential damage to accountability and service transparency? Taking an extended transaction cost perspective, we argue that corporatization—the provision of public services by publicly owned companies—is a function of fiscal hardship, the decision maker’s economic orientation and the level of operator transparency. Using a two-way fixed effects regression, we test this expectation on 680 investment reports of 34 German cities from 1998 to 2017, representing 11,062 year-corporatized entity combinations. We show that the drivers of corporatization are sensitive to the depth of local ownership analyzed. In doing so, we highlight the theoretical need and potential for conceptual differentiation between ownership levels along a corporation’s lineage. Exploiting the data’s panel structure, we also find that the intensity of corporatization has heightened since the late 1990s, largely due to increasingly complex corporate structures of indirect ownership.

中文翻译：

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地方政府公司化强度的变化：来自德国城市的证据

鉴于公共服务公司的经济效益不确定，且可能损害问责制和服务透明度，为何地方政府要创建和改革公共服务公司？从扩展的交易成本角度来看，我们认为公司化（由上市公司提供公共服务）是财政困难、决策者的经济取向和运营商透明度水平的函数。我们使用双向固定效应回归，对 1998 年至 2017 年德国 34 个城市的 680 份投资报告（代表 11,062 个年份的公司化实体组合）测试了这一预期。我们表明，公司化的驱动因素对所分析的地方所有权的深度很敏感。在此过程中，我们强调了公司沿袭所有权级别之间概念区分的理论需求和潜力。利用数据面板结构，我们还发现，自 20 世纪 90 年代末以来，公司化的强度有所加强，这主要是由于间接所有权的公司结构日益复杂。